: it business insider
How to not put someone
to sleep with a slidedeck
Finally, someone has crystallized what it means to give
annoying PowerPoint presentations and, more to the point,
what can be done about it. In this month’s Wired, a story
by Daniel Pink features the leaders of a movement called
Pecha Kucha. The rules are simple: keep your PowerPoint
presentations to 20 slides with each slide on screen for
a maximum of 20 seconds. No more 100-slide presentations, no more diagrams that have to be explained over
the course of 15 minutes, no more squinting at paragraphs
requiring explanations.
Pecha Kucha (which is actually pronounced something
like pet chatchka) is something we should all strive for.
Want to give a presentation where people actually leave
their BlackBerries alone? This is for you. Embrace Pecha
Kucha. Next, I’m hoping someone will tackle Excel spreadsheets. Insider is not an accountant. Insider is a journalist.
Insider does not want to look across 37 columns worth of
data to find something relevant. For the love of Microsoft,
please help.
The car’s the star
Microsoft has filed for a patent that would make driving a
car akin to playing a video game. Not smashing into stuff
and firing rockets at other vehicles on the road (we hope),
but a heads-up display (more commonly referred to as a
HUD) that would provide the driver with a bevy
of information.
Possible features include: what MP3 is currently playing, where the nearest parking spot might be, how fast the
car is travelling, and information about the driver’s health.
The latter feature is oddly disturbing. One would hope that
the driver’s health is currently good enough to keep the
car on the road. A display that would indicate otherwise
isn’t going to be much good to anyone. What isn’t apparent
from the HUD is where the other cars on the road might
be in relation to the driver’s car. Apparently that’s not all
that important when it comes to motor vehicles of the
future. You’ve been warned.
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G irls don’t just
wanna have fun
It’s well known that the number of women
engaged in IT jobs is woefully low...and getting
lower. Same goes for enrolment in computer
science and technical degrees. So how do
we fix this? Call me a cynic, but
I’m not sure the right way is to
invite 13-year-old girls to make
binary bracelets composed of one
and zero beads. That’s one of the
options available at an IBM girls”
camp offered at Big Blue’s Watson Research Centre in Massachu-
setts. Other activities include dipping flowers into liquid nitrogen.
What, no basketweaving with extension cords? No making ginger-
bread men with pocket protectors? It’s hard to see how arts and
crafts with a high-tech theme is going to inspire more women to
work in the sector, but I guess we’ve
got to start somewhere.
Perhaps IBM can phase out the
jewellery portion of the girls’ camp
and focus on some other aspects
that might be of genuine interest
to future technologists. IBM also
offers Lego robot programming and
a project management exercise in
Second Life. That’s more like it.
: yukitup
Code yellow
I had been doing tech support for Hewlett-Packard’s DeskJet division for about
a month when I had a customer call with a problem I just couldn’t solve. She
could not print yellow. All the other colors would print fine, which truly baffled
me because the only true colors are cyan, magenta, and yellow. For instance,
green is a combination of cyan and yellow, but green printed fine. Every color of
the rainbow printed fine except for yellow.
I had the customer change ink cartridges. I had the customer delete and reinstall the drivers. Nothing worked. I asked my co-workers for help; they offered
no new ideas.
After over two hours of troubleshooting, I was about to tell the customer to
send the printer in to us for repair when she asked quietly, “Should I try printing
on a piece of white paper instead of this yellow construction paper?”
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